Rugby update

Yesterday Rachel, Sis, Linda Brach, JW and I took the shuttle from the race site to Penrith train station. The shuttle was driven by this wild woman who kept stripping the gears and talking a mile a minute. I was dressed entirely in my uniform and carrying a paddle so it was obvious that I wasn't a local. I was sitting between two men from New Zealand. They were happy to tell me (between comments about how this woman was going to kill us all) that the USA Rugby team was doing well.

There was a detailed discussion about how lost I had gotten while trying to get to Chinatown. We didn't have a good map and didn't know what we were doing but on Tuesday night we took the train into Central station and wandered around looking for a China gate or a line of Chinese stores or anything to make it clear that this was Chinatown. We found nothing and ended up at a Thai joint that had curry which cleaned out both Jen L and me (to be somewhat discrete.)

Anyway, I was telling this story (not the curry part) to the man next to me and the bus driver shouts back, "But it easy to find Chinatown!" To which I respond, "Not if you're me." She then proceeds to tell me exactly how to get there.

She dropped us off at Penrith station to take the train back to Parramatta. The trains here are nice. Each platform has a monitor that shows when the next train is coming (8 minutes out or 2 minutes out, etc.) shows the last stop in bold and then has a rolling list of every station on that line. It makes it easy to count how many stations 'til your stop and make sure you are on the right train.

The trains themselves are very large and multi-leveled. You enter on the middle and you can turn left or right and go up to a viewing level or down to a below platform level. The lower level lets you check out people's shoes.

The one bad part about the trains is the distance between the train car and the station platform. You know how in Britain the famous line is "Mind the Gap?" Here is should be "Mind the Really Big Gap and that First Step" because not only do you have to jump over but you have to jump up or down.